skygiants | Entries tagged with k.j. charles

I read K.J. Charles' Death in the Spires more or less in the course of a day, which happened to be the same day that I was reading comments on/responding to

blotthis' post about aesthetic satisfaction in Genre: Mystery and Genre: Horror.

Death in the Spires is a really useful case study for genre: Mystery because Charles' usual Genre is Gay Romance. As this book was coming out she made a number of posts and announcements along the lines of: hello Readership, please be aware, this one's not Romance, it's Mystery, which does not mean there won't be romance in it, but please go into it with Mystery expectations rather than Romance expectations.

So already I was going into it expecting to pay attention to the rules of genre and how they worked or did not work in this book. And, having finished it feels really clear that the exact same fabric of characters and plot, tailored into a different shape, would form a standard Charles Romance, but because of the pattern being used the finished product is undeniably a Mystery, no question about it. And quite a fun one! I read it in a day!

The premise takes inspiration from Gaudy Night and The Secret History, among others: at the turn of the 20th century, a clique of golden youths forms at Oxford that's shattered by interpersonal romantic drama culminating in a mysterious murder; ten years later, having just received a particularly vicious poison-pen letter, one of the golden-youths-that-was decides it's finally time to figure out which one of his best-friends-that-was is a killer. The youths all seem likeable and the loss of the trust and friendship among them as important to the plot as the murder itself, which is one of the things that makes the book work, IMO.

Because of blot's post, I've been thinking a fair bit about what I want mystery-as-genre to do. P.D. James said very famously that the mystery novel is the restoration of order from disorder: a murder happens, but by the end we understand why and how, and something is done about it to bring justice. Or not done about it; occasionally the detective decides that the just response is to not do anything about it. I do like it when that happens, even if I disagree with the detective on what the just response is. I like it when justice is legitimately a problem, in mystery novels; I like it when the solution is not just the solution to a puzzle (though of course it is pleasant when a puzzle is good) but an attempt at answering the question of 'how do you repair the world, when something terrible has happened that broke it? Because every death is something that breaks it.' I say an attempt because of course this is not really a question that can be answered satisfactorily, but it is nonetheless important to keep trying. So, really, I suppose, I think a mystery novel has succeeded when it has, a little bit, failed: the puzzle is solvable, and solved, but the problem is unsolvable, and the tension between those two things is one of the things that most interests me in a mystery book.

'I want to be a little uncomfortable at the end because of how we as human beings have to keep trying to answer a question that has no good answer by answering questions that do have answers' is probably not a fair thing to ask of mystery novels, which are also, famously, comfort reading. Nonetheless it is what I think the great books in this genre achieve and I think I am right to ask it. I am not saying that Death in the Spires is a great book of the genre, but it is asking the kinds of questions that I want a mystery to ask, and it satisfied me in that, in a way that many modern mystery novels don't.

( a brief detour into spoiler territory )

I am sadly no longer in a small lakeside cottage, nor devouring a paperback a day, but it seems a good transition back into my long tail of overdue booklogs might be talking about K.J. Charles' Will Darling Adventures trilogy (Slippery Creatures, The Sugared Game, Subtle Blood), which I read on my last-to-this vacation and enjoyed very much as vacation reads precisely because they hearken back to and do in fact have a lot of the salient characteristics of yellowing vacation paperback thrillers.

The trilogy focuses on the partnership between working-class WWI vet Will Darling and angsty upper-class conscientious-objector-turned-secret-agent Kim Secretan as they attempt to identify and thwart the various members of a mysterious criminal organization known as the Zodiac, often while attending a 1920s house party or flapper club. It's very much an homage to 1920s/30s pulp fiction, in much the same way that Charles' Sins of the Cities novel is an homage to Victorian sensational fiction, and it's probably not a coincidence that I like these two trilogy-sets about the best of any of her stuff that I've read -- the combination of affectionately high-octane plotting with multi-book arcs allows her the opportunity and space to explore unusual character dynamics while still keeping the books moving along in a way that is fast and tropey and fun.

While the Sins of the Cities trilogy did stick to the standard formula of focusing on one romantic pairing per book, the Will Darling trilogy focuses on the development of Will and Kim's romance all through -- each book leaves them by the end in a relatively good place for where they're at and introduces new complications in the next one as they get to know each other better and get more entangled in each other's lives. I really enjoyed this structure; it's so nice to get a chance to get past the "I just met you and this is crazy" phase and dig into some storytelling about semi-established relationships, and romance novels just by standard convention do not get to do this very much!

As is often the case with Charles, there are B-plot lesbians, and they are delightful and charming and More Sensible Emotionally And Practically Than The Men and do not get any of the meaty interpersonal conflicts with each other that the male leads do. Someday perhaps Charles will finally getting around to writing a lesbian romance with teeth but this is not that day. (I certainly enjoyed reading Proper English but one couldn't really say it has teeth.)

SCENE: MY OFFICE, LAST WEEK

COWORKER A: [makes some comment mostly unrelated to Edwardian house parties]
ME: Ah, just like an Edwardian house party!
COWORKER B: [popping up from the cubicle] I just read a book about an Edwardian house party! It was really good!
ME: ...was it by K.J. Charles and about lesbians -
COWORKER B: It was by K.J. Charles and about lesbians!

So on my last work trip I read Proper English, K.J. Charles' loving lesbian homage to the country house mystery (a prequel to Think of England, another loving homage to the country house mystery, but with more espionage). It's very sweet! Unlike the standard dual-POV romance, Charles spends the whole book in the head of Fen, a sensible outdoorsy Confirmed Bachelorette who has been invited to a nice hunting-party with her brother and his best friend, and is dismayed to find a whole host of other people have somehow or other been included, including, among others, the best friend's unhappy sister, terrible brother-in-law, and sweet serial-engagement-breaking fiancee.

(Sidenote: I spend a lot of time when reading about Edwardian house parties thinking about how stressful and dull they sound, and then I remember I spent three days this past week in a cabin in Maine with some close friends, and, okay, that also is a house part, and it's great. But at such gatherings I never have to deal with random unpleasant strangers who invited themselves!)

Anyway, various people fall in love, and all the mismatched romances and the murder mystery sort themselves out with a maximum of supportiveness and a surprising minimum of stress, and it's all very pleasant and I enjoyed it, but I also look forward to the first time K.J. Charles decides to write a lesbian romance with as much high drama and tension and energy as, for example, A Seditious Affair or An Unnatural Vice. Or Any Old Diamonds, which I also recently read!

Any Old Diamonds is another single-POV story, and also it is a heist story, about a young late Victorian lordlet who hires jewel thieves to steal a diamond necklace from his terrible father, and then also starts banging one of them. There are twists! There are turns! There are complicated family dynamics and surprise identity reveals! There is ... probably not enough emotional fallout from any of that, at the end, but I still found it an extremely enjoyable read.

Personally I did not like as well Band Sinister, which is probably the fluffiest K.J. Charles I have yet read, and certainly a good book for people who like their romances very fluffy! For me, it was helpful in realizing that, much as with mattresses, there's a level of soft that is just a little Too Soft for me. Anyway this one is Regency and involves a naive young pair of siblings who, for plot reasons, have to spend an extended period of time at the house of their nemesis, the local polyamorous rake. Fortunately it takes very little time for the naive young closeted gay gentleman to overcome most of his inborn prejudices and decide he's up for some romance, and for the local polyamorous rake to discover that he likes nothing better than being very gentle to naive but enthusiastic young gentlemen, and for the back half of the book the conflict is largely external and involves an aggressive aunt.

When I posted about K.J. Charles' Society of Gentlemen series last year, various people told me that I ought to try the Sins of the Cities series instead for a Less Overwhelmingly Aristocratic Good Time, and they were quite correct!

Sins of the Cities is a satisfyingly tightly-plotted trilogy in which a group of gay Victorian pals get entangled in CONSPIRACY and MURDER and also, of course, finding various sorts of true love over the course of the three books:

An Unseen Attraction, in which lodging-house owner Clem's very sweet romance with his taxidermist lodger Rowley is unfortunately interrupted by the murdered corpse on their doorstep and the machinations of Clem's very shady brother. I liked this a lot, especially because the shape of it is quite different from most romance novels -- the protagonists have known and liked each other for a long time and are ready to start their romance at the time the book begins, so the arc of the story is not a meet-cute-will-they-won't-they, but about two people earnestly trying to make a relationship work while weathering various external stressors, such as, indeed, murder. To me it also seemed like Charles did a pretty solid job writing mixed-race autistic Clem, though obviously I am not super qualified to comment.

An Unnatural Vice -- the complete opposite of An Unseen Attraction, a beautiful concoction of high-drama tropes flambé. RIGHTEOUSLY ANGRY JOURNALIST NATHANIEL is DETERMINED to expose SEXY PSYCHIC JUSTIN as the FRAUD he IS! Then the murder and conspiracies happen and Nathan and Justin are forced! to live together! for SEVERAL SEXY MONTHS!! Yes, OK, Charles, you had me at "Justin has but a single moral and it goes towards protecting his tiny con artist moppet apprentices."

An Unsuitable Heir, in which one-armed Polish private eye Mark hunts down a pair of genderfluid trapeze artist twins to give them a legacy they do not want, falling for one of the twins in the process. I enjoyed this, but it's definitely the one that worked least well for me and PERHAPS COINCIDENTALLY is also the one that involved the most Aristocracy Stuff; also, I respect Charles' effort to write a nonbinary protagonist in Victorian England who does not have access to the terminology or gender theory, but it felt a bit to me like Charles was so determined to model a Supportive And Understanding Love Interest that Mark didn't get much of a chance to develop as a co-protagonist himself. YMMV, though!

I don't want to say too much about the how the plots interlock, because spoilers, but I do enjoy how the protagonists in Charles' various series tend to be very present and engaged in each other's lives, and also how the events that she writes have ripple effects that impact various people in different ways; this happens in Society of Gentlemen too but I think works better here. (I also enjoy how very nerdy she allows herself to get with Victorian sensationalist literature jokes.)

There were so many books I meant to write up this year and never managed to get round to, and I hope I still will get round to some of them in the New Year! But for my last post of this year I'm going to aim to knock out as many as I can in one post by writing up K.J. Charles' Society of Gentlemen series, all three novels of which I read this year, generally on airplanes.

All three of these books are queer Regency romances between a.) one member of a club of gay aristocratic buddies and b.) someone who is pretty much not an aristocrat:

A Fashionable Indulgence, in which a dandy takes on the My Fair Lady-ing of a junior impoverished radical who comes into an inheritance and now wants to be an aristocrat instead of a radical. This is a difficult premise for me because on the one hand, being Very Tired by All The Bad Things and just wanting to relax and have a nice life IS very relatable and I sort of respect Charles for leaning into that, but on the other hand, aristocracy IS a poison and the one percent ARE morally reprehensible and it's also hard to frame 'and I decided to just lean into the fact that following my dreams means living a pleasantly boring life with all my inherited wealth!' as an act of moral courage per se....

A Seditious Affair, in which an actually serious radical printer and an aristocrat who work for the Home Office have been carrying on secret anonymous assignations for ages and then have to deal with it when they realize that They Are Political Enemies. For me this was by far the most interesting of the trilogy and also the most successful as a book. I'm very into romances where the main obstacle is Genuine Idealism; Silas the pragmatic middle-aged lower-class revolutionary printing press owner is a character designed to appeal to me and the narrative actually manages to set up his romance with a conservative aristocrat in a way that doesn't require him to compromise more of his ideals than I found livable, although of course it does that by setting up a convenient 'well this particular revolution is stupid and badly constructed and probably a trap anyway!' like yes, okay, but so is the class system...

A Gentleman's Position, in which an aristocrat who thinks of himself as Very Moral is uncomfortable about banging his valet, for moral reasons; the plot thinks that this actually means he wasn't respecting his valet's agency and I can understand why his valet would be annoyed about that but I still think honestly from a moral perspective he was probably right. Had a minimum of radicals and therefore I don't remember much else.

In addition to these three novels there is also at least one novella and several short stories that I have not read. I did read a novella of hers called Wanted, A Gentleman which I thought was part of this series but turned out not to be, which was probably for the best; it was about an amoral printer and a wealthy black freedman who have to work together to ... stop someone eloping to Gretna Green maybe? I don't actually remember much about the plot but I think I did find it overall pretty enjoyable.

The thing here honestly is that Charles is genuinely trying to do more with class and social issues than many Regency romances and I do have a lot of respect for that, but as soon as a Regency romance hands me a single reminder of the existence of radical political movements I immediately start wanting to spend all my time with them and wondering why we have to care about aristocrats at all. (I mean, I know why, and it's because dukes rake in the dollars, but.)

Anyway my real favorite KJ Charles book that I read this year was The Henchman of Zenda, unapologetic Rupert of Hentzau/Jasper Detchard Ruritanian adventure slash fanfic. I didn't think poor Rudolf Rassendyll needed to be quite as vilified as he was but otherwise I enjoyed this very much; I was initially quite dubious about anyone trying to force cheerfully amoral Rupert and Jasper into traditional romantic true love molds and fortunately this book does not at all attempt to. Also, it hits a very good style balance of feeling just enough like Zenda pastiche to get the flavor while also being modern enough to do the rest of what it wants to do. Feels like very good Yuletide fic and I mean that as a compliment.